Elite Eternity

Shoemoney Redesigns Blog. Looks Like Every Other Thesis Site on The Web.

2012-02-26T15:51:33-08:00

Haters gonna hate…

So I was excited when I saw Chris Pearsons tweet about Shoemoney redesigning his whole site with Thesis. I thought maybe, just maybe I’d see a stunning variation on the bare bones look of Thesis that I’m so used to seeing. Nope.

You see, I used to be part of the Thesis circle jerk, before abandoning it for what I now feel is a much better-looking, easier-to-look-professional alternative.

Shoemoney. Love ya man. But I hate your redesign. Of course I don’t expect you to care, but why, oh why would you ditch your last design for this standard, out of the box, gray nav bar, Thesis look? Maybe Chris offered you a preview of a new version and you wanted to play with it and experiment during a time where maybe your blog traffic isn’t what it once was.

Maybe the performance metrics are a touch faster than your previous theme. Hell, I don’t know.

I do know though that I’ve liked all of your previous redesigns much better than what you’ve got now.

And for you Chris Pearson: You’re obviously extremely intelligent. A kick ass coder. You know your stuff. I don’t question your skills for one second. But I don’t understand why in the world a dude with such an affinity for typography lets an out-of-the-box-look like this fly:

(…maybe it’s the mathematically proper use of typography ?)

But Chris, maybe that’s the point. You build a nice framework, and then it’s up to people to customize and beautify it. That’s fine…but nobody does.

I have no doubt that with a huge wad of cash, I could pay a coder to snazz the hell out of the default Thesis theme, but it seems to me that one of the main selling points of Thesis is that it’s so incredibly easy to customize. Yeah, it’s easy to change from different column layouts, adjust font sizes, etc etc… but who really wants to deal with all of that shit for the most part?

Maybe I’m a noob, scratch that, I know I’m a noob. But the majority of your Theme users are too.

You can watch a blog designed on Thesis over time and you’ll see colors change, a layout change perhaps, but common among all the sites is disgusting looking typography, and cookie-cutter nob jockeyness.

Chris: make your theme less lame out of the box. I’ve never understood why you are on a typographical high horse when 99% of the sites on the web that use your theme display a tragic use of typography. And you’re enabling them! (see above photos).

To those considering purchasing Thesis: Unless you enjoy fiddle fu*#@ing around with html, css, php, and typography, like some people (myself included sometimes), I’d look elsewhere. Right now I like Genesis. It’s a thousand times easier to launch a good-looking site right out of the box, than it is with Thesis.

Enough of my bitching.

Cheers to everyone developing themes and frameworks. I am in your debt, and I am unquestionably unqualified to question your work…

But that doesn’t mean that I won’t anyways.

Inspectlet: Perfect Blend of Crazy Egg & Clicktale, & Cheaper Than Both.

2011-12-15T00:57:19-08:00

Now you can peek over your customers shoulders as they browse your website in real time!

Inspectlet is a new real-time analytics, and website heat mapping + screen capture tool that allows you to take a peek at how your customers react with your website as they browse. This means that the software literally takes screencapture videos of users cursor trails as they navigate from page to page on your website.

Inspectlet was kind enough to give me a free demo of their platform, and despite a few issues (the most substantial being a speed issue with my site after the install, that they immediately fixed after an email), the features provided are well worth the price. Their basic plan is even cheaper than the most well known heatmapping solution, called crazy egg – and crazy egg doesnt even offer the ability to record user sessions – inspectlet does.

So if you arent in a position to pay the huge monthly fees for a robust solution like clicktale, yet you arent happy with the cheaper, more watered down solution that is crazy egg, then inspectlet is probably right for you. They offer a free one week trial so you can test the waters.

I have personally tried crazy egg off and on over the last several years, and the data I harvested just didnt justify paying the monthly fee. Especially when there is no screencapturing! Im no analytics pro, but when i compare inspectlet with crazy egg and clicktale, inspectlet offers the most bang for my buck.

I wish that they would add the option to filter out my IP from data gathering. This is actually a critical feature that needs to be added asap. Or maybe they already have. Its been a minute or two since i last logged in and they are usually quick about fixing things.

So give inspectlet a try.

I almost felt like a spy when i watched my first recorded screencapture. Try it. You will too.

Note: password and other sensitive information fields are obviously censored out, so dont get too excited.

3 Things To Know Before Buying Thesis Theme

2011-10-20T13:23:28-07:00

I’ve used the Thesis theme for the last few years and for the most part, I’ve been really happy with it.

Clean code, good SEO control, and a great support forum with very helpful users. And if there’s one feature I’m repeatedly glad for with this theme it is the fact that there is a responsive support forum, because I’ve spent a huge amount of time in the trenches there.

Nothing but love for the gods and girlies on that forum.

So without further ado, here are 3 things that I wish I would have known before jumping on the Thesis theme bandwagon. I won’t try to talk you out of Thesis, but depending on what kind of person you are, what you’re looking for, and how much you love to tinker, there may be better options for your first (paid) WordPress theme.

1. Thesis is Ugly

Right out of the box, the thesis theme is pretty darn ugly. It is minimalism at it’s finest, and the simplicity of a fresh install may be quite underwhelming for some new customers.

If you’re looking for a theme that impresses, visually speaking, right out of the box, you’ll want to look elsewhere, because to make your Thesis theme you, you’re going to need to get your hands dirty, or pay someone else to do the customizations for you. Which leads me to my next point …

2. You Need to Know Code

Or at least be comfy copying/pasting it, and or manipulating it. I guess this argument could be made against most all themes if you want customization of any sort, but I’ve probably learned more code trying to modify my various Thesis websites than I learned from reading my first big HTML coding book several years ago.

If you decide to run with Thesis, you’re going to be copying, pasting, modifying, and experimenting like crazy. The good thing, though, is that there IS a lot of code out there that’s easily accessible. And the Thesis site has tons of tutorials that do a good job at telling you what code to put where. The thing is, most of my Thesis sites have turned into massive code playgrounds.

I’ll spend night after night modifying code: php, html, css, etc… and finally get the right mix for the look I’m trying to put forth. The bad thing is though, that I’m not a designer, nor a coder, so my website usually reflects my skill level with both. So I usually get to a point of discouragement, and I go around searching for other good-looking thesis themes that I can mimic … and then I usually discover that there aren’t many that are all that impressive. They all wreak of the same relatively boring layouts, choppy typography, and boring nav bars. Sure, the nav may be located above the header on one site, and below it on another, but that’s usually the extent of their customization.

I’m just being honest.

Take these sites for example. They are even featured on the DIY Themes (Thesis) home page as some of their best examples.

http://daggle.com/
http://6767.com/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Impressed? Meh, me neither.

To be fair, here are some of the better looking ones:

http://www.nerdist.com/
http://www.spring.org.uk/
http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
http://mattbites.com/

But they obviously spent some time & no doubt money, customizing the bare bones Thesis design. And to be fair, thesis never claimed to be good looking. They focus on building a solid framework so that you can build on top of that.

3. Their Marketing Advice is Priceless

Here’s the deal.

Even if my two previous points made you think twice before getting your hands dirty with Thesis, you should not think twice before checking out & subscribing to their blog.

They consistently post incredibly helpful articles dealing with wordpress seo and modifying your site for better marketability.

These are just some things to think about.

As for me, I’m taking a break from Thesis (at least on this site). Right now I have an out of the box studiopress theme installed. I think it looks at least as good as, if not better than, the Thesis theme that I was running here a few weeks ago.

Mass Redirections With WordPress [How To]

2011-10-16T12:18:29-07:00

I have been forced to do tons of mass URL redirections on several of my WordPress sites as of late.

It’s an unfortunate, but necessary biproduct of messing around with URL structures.

For instance, on this blog, a URL to a post used to be: http://eliteeternity.com/category/post-name/

But now, it is http://eliteeternity.com/post-name/

(If you want to learn more about permalinks (wordpress URL structures), and how to modify them on your wordpress blog, there is some really good information here.)

But back on point …

In the example above, I removed the “category” portion of the URL, so since I did that, all of the posts that I have indexed in Google with the “/category/” prefix are now dead links.

This is bad.

For instance, if someone were to search for something in Google, and my site was ranked for what they were searching for, and then they clicked the link to that specific post on my blog, there is a really good chance that they would get a “page not found” error.

That’s obviously not good for the user; nor is it good for me.

So how do we fix this?

How do we redirect all of the OLD URL permalinks to the NEW permalinks that no longer have the “/category/” prefix in them?

How To

Download & Install the Redirection plugin for wordpress. Found here.
Get the list of old OLD URL’s that you need to redirect. If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up for your site, this is easy. Go to Diagnostics > Crawl Errors > Not Found … then “Download this table” (at the bottom of the error’d URL’s).
Point OLD URL’s to NEW URL’s. Once you’ve got the list of old URL’s, you’re going to need to point them to the new URL’s. Download this spreadsheet I created, and make appropriate edits for your site.
Make Edits. Open the file redirection-worksheet.csv you just downloaded, and paste your old URL’s in the specified column. Now, right next to the old URL’s, you’re going to find the updated URL on your website, and paste it into the NEW URL column. Leave the “hits” column blank.
Important: Once you’ve updated that spreadsheet with the old and new URL’s, SAVE IT AS a WINDOWS COMMA SEPARATED (.csv). This is especially important if you are on a Mac, I think. If you don’t save it in the proper format, it won’t work, as I pointed out in this support thread.
Now, go to the Redirection plugin settings within your WordPress admin, under “Tools” on the left sidebar. Click the “Options” tab at the top.
Import .csv. Now you will see a headline that says “Import”. Click Choose File, and select the updated redirection-worksheet.csv that you just updated.
Now upload as Redirections, and you should be all set.
Now just wait for Google Webmaster Tools to realize that you made all of the redirections.

Explain This.

2011-10-14T23:08:21-07:00

Have you ever had the odd experience of learning a new word that you had never in your life heard before, and then, in as little as a few hours later, you happen to hear that same exact word again?

I know I have, and I find it strange. It brings a whole lots of “Why’s?” to mind.

Well if that’s strange, then what I’m about to toss at you will completely freak you out.

I know it did me …

Call it God, call it the law of attraction, call it the order of the universe, call it what you will. All I’m prepared to call it at this point in my life is weird.

I sold my car a few weeks ago, and as such, have been riding around on my little red tricycle to get from point A to B. Thankfully, the furthest I need to travel most of the time is to my mailbox to pick up checks. Anywho …

I went to lunch today with some friends of mine, and while there, learned that a certain friend was selling his car. I bought it on the spot, and then we headed to his house to pick up the title for the car.

As I neared his home, I noticed him in his beater (soon to be my beater), rolling backwards down the driveway. I didn’t know what the crap he was doing, but he’s a peculiar individual, so I just wrote it off as him being himself.

As I got out of my car, borrowed for the day, I cautiously approached my friend rolling backwards down his steeply graded driveway. He motioned for me to get in the car. I swung the door open, sat down, and began to listen to one of the most random life lessons I’ve ever learned. Little did I know, that random lesson would save someone’s life in just a few short hours. Kidding … it’s not that dramatic, but cool nonetheless.

Keep reading.

He shared with me one of the few things that he knows about the mechanics of how to get a car started if the starter won’t work. He’s hardly mechanically inclined, and I, much less so, so the significance that he had something to share with me about cars at all is funny in and of itself. We rolled down the hill that was his driveway backwards one more time. Near the bottom, he popped the clutch, gave the car gas, and the engine started right up.

Cool to know, I guessed. Could come in handy some time, probably long after I would have ever recalled how to make use of the procedure, but I made a mental note nonetheless.

Really guys, why would I ever need to know how to start a car if the starter wouldn’t work? Maybe that’s common knowledge to some of you folks, but for us nerdy individuals, that’s not something that you need to know on a daily basis. What a random thing to learn at such a random time. Random, I say.

After that, he helped me get my newly acquired soon-t0-be Ron Paul pimp-mobile to my house; I took him back to his office, end of story.

New car. New useless random knowledge. Cool.

Fast forward two hours. Literally.

My brother and I decide to go to the store. Mind you, this isn’t a store that we often frequent (like Walmart). We’ve only been to this particular store like twice or three times in our lives, and today would probably be our last visit.

There are two things significant about the preceding paragraph. 1. I hardly EVER leave the house/my home office unless I’m eating, or going to pick up on chicks at the local Walmart. 2. We never go to that store.

So …

I guess you can imagine my surprise when just as we were about to leave the parking lot, a lady parked in a car a few stalls away from my car waves at me from the inside of her car. I look at her with a WTF/leave me alone face, typical me, and she proceeds to get out of her car and jog over to mine.

Her – “Hey, can you do me a big favor?”

Me – “What’s that?”

Her – “Well, my car won’t start, and I don’t know how to get it started. It’s happened before, and I think my friend started it by rolling it backwards or something, but I don’t know how to do it.”

Me – (WTF. Is this a setup?) – “Yeah I think I know how to do it.” (Bonus: I always say I “think” I know how to do crap, when I KNOW how to do it. Something that bugs me about myself.)

So my brother and I get out of my car. I get in her car (anybody that knows me personally might find this significant, because I’m usually an anti-socialite, maybe it’s the anxiety meds lol), and proceed to work my magic.

First try. I had obviously never done this before, having only been briefly schooled on how to do it two hours before. So, I began rolling backwards down the decline that her car was parked on.

Seriously? A decline? The scenario was so similar to that which I had been shown no more than two hours earlier that it blew me away.

Were my skills to observe and then duplicate being tested?

Reminds me of a quote from the movie Zoolander.

First model walks, second model
duplicates, then elaborates.

So I did just what my friend showed me.

The car started right up. The girl was ecstatic, and I was in shock.

I don’t know if I was shocked because the girl was hot (she was), or because I actually did something useful for someone else for once. Or if the fact that something I had just learned two hours earlier was now being tested in a real world, big boy pants situation.

Maybe this doesn’t seem all that significant to you, reading this. I know I couldn’t care less if this didn’t happen to me personally. But I’m slowly starting to believe that there just may be more to life than “shit just happening because it happens.”

Coincidence?

Give me a break. Even me, doubter of all doubters doesn’t buy into the coincidence explanation this time. Hopefully I won’t slip back into the doubtful me that I usually revert to.

Maybe I need to lay off of my daily glass of Think and Grow Rich.

I’m slowly starting to believe …

iOS5 Update Calendar Events Duplicated (Easy Fix)

2011-10-12T13:37:21-07:00

Just downloaded the latest iOS from Apple, and everything seemed to have gone smoothly except for the fact that the calendar on my phone had a duplicate of all events.

I checked my phone sync settings on iTunes and noticed that I had the “Sync iCal Calendars” box selected.

Since iOS5 is now using iCloud to sync calendar events between all of your devices, apparently it’s no longer necessary to have this box selected.

Your calendars are being synced with iCloud over the air. You can also choose to sync calendars with this computer. This may result in duplicated data showing on your device.

Remove Duplicates

So all you’ve got to do is this:

Plug in your iPhone
Open iTunes
Click on your phone under “Devices”
Click the “Info” Tab
Uncheck the “Sync iCal Calendars” box.
If I remember correctly, it asked if I wanted to remove all of the events from my iPhone calendar. Yes.
Sync again, and now your iPhone should show the proper events in your calendar. i.e. one of each, as opposed to the duplication.

Enjoy your iOs 5. I know I am.

Not sure how we ever survived without the notification center and other notification improvements.

Daily Alerts For Your Niche

2011-10-09T14:03:38-07:00

We marketers need all the help we can get to stay on top of our niche’s so that we can stay on top of our make money online game.

A really cool tool that I just rediscovered called Google Alerts feeds me daily updates of all of the top action going on in my niche.

So lets say for instance that you wanted to stay on top of everything (or at least the important things) that are going on around the internet for “Ferrari 458 Italia Wheels.”

You’d go to http://www.google.com/alerts, type in the term that you want to stay on top of, along with the email address that you want the information sent to, and then you’ll get a daily/weekly digest of all of the important “Ferrari 458 Italia Wheels” content on the internet.

I use google alerts as a way to track the various players in my niche, as well as to hit up unsuspecting bloggers for a linky link.

Ways I use Google Alerts

Ask people to link to my site.
Reply to articles and leave a link to my site.
Make video reply videos to people on youtube, and post my website link in the video description for seo benefit.
Link to these articles from your website if relevant.
Spy on competition.

So if you’re tired of researching your niche, and you want to be spoon fed by google, go set up some alerts.